More than any other late-Victorian writer, Oscar Wilde has proven to be an enduring, powerful, and global presence in popular culture. In biography, theater, film, dance, opera, and performance, Wilde's writing have had a richly various afterlife. Whereas once critics saw Wilde as simply an accomplished playwright, today they understand him as anticipating subsequent cultural trends in all of the arts. This panel considers Wilde in terms of his place in several works of twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture as well as his status as a mythic figure, the progenitor of a queer, “Warholian” and "post-Warholian" celebrity persona that is at once—and appropriately for a writer famous for his paradoxes—paradoxically and simultaneously "Victorian," "modern," and "post-modern". The three talks proposed for this panel are suggestively wide-ranging but quite focused. Each talk is by an established scholar of Oscar Wilde and will last fifteen minutes, allowing time for discussion.

In “Dorian Gray Turned Noir: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Classic Hollywood,” Kate Hext draws on the landmark 1945 film adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray (MGM, Dir. and Wr. Albert Lewin) as a lens through which to investigate how Wildean aesthetics had a direct influence on classic Hollywood. It shows how and why Wilde’s epigrammatic dialogue and visual aesthetics were attractive to filmmakers in the ‘40s, suggesting that Wilde was a familiar ghost-figure in Hollywood, who modestly expanded the scope of the film noir. The reason lies both in the persistent cultural cache of decadent literature and in Wilde’s modernity. After all, writing just before the boom in short detective fiction, Wilde plays with some of its nascent characteristics and advances its form in so doing. Moreover, his narrative develops elements of the gothic into a proto-noir visual aesthetic and incorporates the structures of interrogatory language and forms (put into relief by the form of the Wildean aphorism) into the dialogue of Basil and Lord Henry as they attempt to uncover his secret life in the second part of the novel. Albert Lewin exploits the film noir potential of Dorian Gray by building on Wilde’s proto-detective dialogue, developing Dorian into a queer figure and--crucially--working with his cinematographer Harry Stradling to develop Wilde’s descriptions of light to advance the fledgling visual grammar of noir. The paper draws on unpublished draft scripts lodged in the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles.

In “The Great Affection of an Elder for a Younger Man”: Representing Wildean Desire on the Stage,” Kristin Mahoney consider how, in the decades following Wilde’s death, posthumous followers of the writer quickly began to develop what Richard Kaye has referred to as a “sense of Wilde as risk-taking leader of a newly constituted breed of erotically dissident men,” and he acquired a reputation as a martyr and saintly gay icon. In this paper, Mahoney focuses on the role popular biographical plays about Wilde played in the development of this reputation in the twentieth century, paying particular attention to how these works negotiate the question of Wilde’s investment in age-differentiated same-sex eroticism. Drawing on Kadji Amin’s work on pederastic kinship, Mahoney considers how Wilde's plays represent the playwright's interest in younger men as indicators of the vexed position of intergenerational desire within queer formulations of alternative kinship. While Wilde foregrounded the centrality of mentorship within such relationships in his own writings and during his trials, as Amin argues, an eroticism that places age and power difference at its center has the potential to be as damaging as it is nurturing. Beginning with early works such as Leslie and Sewell Stokes’s Oscar Wilde (1936) and turning to the proliferation of biographical plays about Wilde during the latter half of the twentieth century (including The Importance of Being Oscar [1960], Feasting with Panthers [1974], Diversions and Delights [1977], Lord Alfred’s Lover [1981], Saint Oscar [1989], Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde [1997], and The Judas Kiss [1998]), Mahoney considers how stage representations of Wilde register transformations within the broader understanding of pedagogic eros, highlighting the difficulties these playwrights encounter as they canonize Wilde as a gay icon while acknowledging his interest in erotic encounters animated by power differentials.

In ”Lust-Withered Gardens”: Biography, the New Formalism, and Post-Warholian Wilde,” Richard A. Kaye examines the tensions between four recent trends determining Wilde’s influence, status, and persona in biography, aesthetic theory, and film. In the first of these trends, Wilde has emerged as a reckless sexual adventurer, most recently in the 2018 biography by Matthew Sturgis and in the 2018 film ‘The Happy Prince,” directed and starring Rupert Everett. Such works elevate and burden Wilde with the role of outlaw, a revered figure but a casualty of what Wilde once referred to as “lust-withered gardens." Wilde emerges as a rebel against the rigidities of a punitive Victorian society. A countervailing, non-biographical trend in today’s literary criticism—part of the New Formalist Studies—accentuates Wilde’s centrality in the history of aesthetics. New Formalist critics construe Wilde as the decisive link between late-nineteenth century aesthetic theory and twentieth-century artistic practice. In a third trend, Wilde has accrued high cultural premium as the proto-founder of Pop Art, an inspiration for the artist Andy Warhol and other 1970s and 1980s artists. Todd Haynes’ 1998 film Velvet Goldmine, for example, presents Wilde as a cosmic, intergalactic muse who transcends his moment in history in order to shape a 1970s era of artifice and youth rebellion embodied in Glam Rock, whose progenitors are androgynous, bisexual lovers. At the same time, recent works of popular culture have presented a “post-Warholian” Wilde, prized not so much for his disreputable glamour and performativity as for the emotive force of his writing. Kaye focuses on the 2013 movie The Selfish Giant, directed by Clio Barnard and set in the impoverished Yorkshire industrial town of Bradford. Inspired by Wilde’s fairy tale of the same name, the film is a grimly naturalistic work that nonetheless allows for what the post-modern, Warholian Wilde largely had repressed: the sentimental.